- The APPG for Students has launched the Commission on Students in Higher Education as a means of feeding into the Department for Education’s HE Review through a student-centred lens. A call for evidence has now opened, until May 1st, where colleagues from across the sector are encouraged to input.
- Alex Stanley is Vice President Higher Education of the National Union of Students (NUS).
- Saranya Thambirajah is Vice President Liberation and Equality of the NUS.
The debates over the financial sustainability of the higher education sector, effective interventions in access and participation, and the quality of teaching will not be new to HEPI readers. Amongst the column inches and radio waves, however, students and the academic community are living these tensions every single day.
It’s no secret that students are working long hours during term time, living pay cheque to pay cheque to cover their rent and bills – plugging the gap created by real-terms cuts to maintenance support. The NUS’s own research shows that of those who work during their studies, over 60% are working over 20 hours per week. While we feel from the stories that students tell us that there must be a link between inadequate maintenance funding, working long hours and students’ eventual attainment and outcomes, we lack an evidence base on the impact of working hours or lack of financial support on students’ attainment.
Similarly, we are all aware that teaching standards and the concept of good degrees have spent the past fourteen years under the microscope, with innovative practice sometimes denounced as dumbing down in the press – and students told their course choice is leaving them with ‘low value degrees’, or that their hard work leading to higher grades is down to grade inflation.
At NUS, we firmly believe the way to cut through the noise is by focusing on the real-life, current experience of students – and that the best way to do that is to bring them into the rooms where decisions are made. We are proud to hold the APPG on Students, for which NUS UK serves as Secretariat, as a space which connects student leaders to Westminster decision makers. We’ve been using this to bring student voice to the Houses of Parliament for over a decade, from launching the landmark research on the Black Attainment Gap, providing space for students to grill Sir Philip Augar immediately after his report launched, to most recently shaping the Renters’ Reform and then Renters’ Rights Bills, with interventions from current students the genesis of now-passed amendments on limiting rent up front and controlling the student lettings cycle. There is no question that bringing students and young people into the room on issues that impact them makes policy decisions better and enriches the debate.
In this vein, we are proud to launch the Commission on Students in Higher Education, designed to place students at the heart of the current debates on funding, teaching and attainment.
The Commission will tackle the big issues of the current funding debate: teaching standards, maintenance funding and student outcomes, drawing on the expertise of a cross-party group of Commissioners and higher education specialists, all working to provide meaningful recommendations which should influence and complement the Department for Education’s HE Review and the Comprehensive Spending Review.
We will begin with an in-person event on Maintenance Funding tomorrow, Wednesday 23 April, when we will hear from proposers of four different ways of funding a more generous student maintenance offer, who will then be questioned by students and Parliamentarians.
We will take in written evidence on the core areas of the Commission: maintenance funding, students and work, widening participation & student outcomes and teaching quality.
We welcome submissions from colleagues across students’ unions, the academic community and sector practitioners who, like us, are keen to see the HE Review and Spending Review succeed in solving some of the existential problems we are facing across the sector.
If you have any questions, please email [email protected]